It used to be even worse!

In one word I can tell you what’s wrong with the Avenue des Champs-Élysées: cars. (Not to mention motorcycles and trucks.)

This street is marketed as “the most beautiful avenue in the world”, and it really is beautiful except for the fact that there is an ugly ten-lane highway running right down the middle. There are four lanes of moving motor traffic in each direction (moving or creeping, as the case may be, or accelerating wildly when the traffic lights change), plus two lanes of parked cars on either side.

If I have measured correctly, the entire avenue is about 67 meters wide. Of that width, roughly 25 meters in the middle is devoted to motor vehicles, with a 21-meter sidewalk for pedestrians on each side. (Don’t worry, I didn’t measure it on the ground.)

The long-promised bicycle lanes have still not been installed, because they would supposedly disrupt the symmetry of the avenue.

While the current situation is unsatisfactory, to say the least, I keep reminding myself that for over half a century, from the late 1930s to the early 1990s, it was worse — much worse, since nearly the entire width of the avenue was given over to cars.

By the 1970s, even car-loving conservative politicians couldn’t help noticing that the character of the Champs-Élysées was changing. The grand hotels, luxury boutiques and elegant restaurants began to leave, being replaced by chain stores and fast-food joints.

So from 1991 to 1994 a sweeping rearrangement of the Champs-Élysées was carried out under the direction of the French architect and urbanist Bernard Huet (1932-2001).

Much of the construction work was coordinated by the engineering firm OGI (Omnium Général d’Ingénierie), which summarized the project as follows:

“The rearrangement of the Champs Élysées consisted of restoring the character of a promenade to an avenue which had become an immense open-air parking lot. To do this, the side roads were eliminated, a second row of trees was planted and the entire surface of the pedestrian area was re-paved in granite.” (My translation.)

Planting a second row of trees may not sound like a huge project, especially since it was just a matter of replacing a row of trees that had been cut down in the 1930s to make room for cars, but in fact this turned out to be a long and very expensive project because in the meantime the dirt under the sidewalk had been replaced by a labyrinth of cables, water pipes, gas pipes, sewer pipes and tunnels, all of which had to be found and relocated.

As you stroll along these wide granite-paved sidewalks today, it is hard to believe that for over half a century most of this surface was used for car parking. But it was.

4 thoughts on “It used to be even worse!”

The only part of the Champs I’ve ever liked was the section from Pl. de la Concorde to the Rond Point. When the stores start, I stop. One of our daughters wanted to see it once so we stopped for a kir at a cafe near the Roosevelt metro stop and not only was it a poor excuse for a kir, it was very overpriced. I am glad they replanted the trees. It must have been awful before they did that. One of the reasons we like Paris so much is all the green space in the city.